AZ water leaders push back on ‘unacceptable’ draft of federal plans for managing Colorado River

Arizona water leaders had some harsh words about a draft of federal plans for managing the Colorado River.

Brenda Burman, general manager of the Central Arizona Project, wrote in a statement that those plans would “disproportionately harm Arizona and are unacceptable.”

The Colorado River is managed according to agreements between the seven states that use it. The current management plan expires this year, and those states have failed to agree on a new deal for sharing water. With states at an impasse, the federal government proposed its own series of options for river management.

Those options, also called “alternatives,” were outlined in a Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

They do not bode well for Arizona.

Water from the Colorado River arrives in Phoenix and Tucson via the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile system of pipes and canals through the desert.

“The DEIS alternatives threaten to tear apart a generation of careful water management and topple the architecture that supports American semi-conductor manufacturing, AI infrastructure industries, and critical mineral and agricultural production,” Burman wrote.

Under one alternative, 77.4% of cutbacks would be dealt to Arizona, according to CAP. Five of the seven states would face zero cuts under that alternative.

A longstanding legal policy called “prior appropriation” generally means that the first people to use Colorado River water will be the last to lose it in times of shortage. The Central Arizona project is a relative newcomer to that system, leaving some of its users as the first to experience cutbacks as the Colorado River dries up amid a megadrought.

Arizona’s leaders are now saying they won’t take those cutbacks in their current form.

A ‘fatal’ legal flaw

The federal draft included an open comment period, and leaders around the West submitted their thoughts. Arizona officials made their feelings clear: they want those plans to change. Some comments seemed to hint that Arizona could pursue legal action if the draft is implemented unchanged.

Both CAP and the Arizona Department of Water Resources made the case that draft federal plans could trigger a violation of the Colorado River Compact and lead to a lawsuit. That 1922 agreement is the bedrock of Colorado River management and spells out how the river is shared among the seven states that use it. It divides the Colorado River between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada.

“The failure of the Draft EIS to acknowledge that the Lower Basin states can seek enforcement of the Compact should the Upper Basin fail to comply with its obligations is a fatal flaw,” ADWR wrote in its comments.

A matter of national security

As the threat of deep cutbacks to Arizona’s Colorado River supply have become more imminent, the state’s leaders have begun to ramp up the importance of the industries that use that water.

Water officials and politicians have framed cuts to the Central Arizona Project as a matter of national security.

Two groups of Arizona congresspeople — one Democratic and one Republican — wrote letters to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, highlighting the importance of Colorado River water to food systems and semiconductor manufacturing in Arizona.

Chelsey Heath/KJZZ

“The semiconductors that are being produced at [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] and Intel, not only will power the leading industries of the future,” Congressman Greg Stanton told KJZZ, “but they'll be powering weapons systems that are so critical for American national defense. We're doing more of that than any other place in the entire United States of America.”

Stanton said disproportionate cuts to Arizona’s water supply would affect the entire country.

“We're going through a shared crisis right now, and the best way of handling it is shared sacrifice,” Stanton said. “As fellow Americans, we're not going to try to put one state in a position where we have to accept the vast disproportionate amount of cuts.”

Engineering solutions

Federal water managers are open about the fact that they would rather not implement their draft plans. They have been asking the states to come to an agreement, but those states have shown little progress. State negotiators blew through a federal deadline in February, but their failure to forge a deal doesn’t seem to have resulted in any material consequences handed down from the federal government.

Meanwhile, the Colorado River faces one of its driest winters in decades, and the amount of water stored in major reservoirs threatens to drop dangerously low.

States have historically dictated plans for sharing the river’s water, but that same water is stored in reservoirs owned by the federal government. At Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, water could soon drop too low to run hydroelectric turbines inside the federally-owned Glen Canyon Dam.

The federal government is considering these draft plans to protect the dam and reservoir.

Some Arizona leaders say the federal government should use a different tool to keep those reservoirs from dropping too low. ADWR’s letter calls on the federal government to release water from other reservoirs upstream of Lake Powell. It’s a strategy that has been used during other recent times of extraordinary water shortages, but is unpopular with Upper Basin leaders.